Why does Canada not have private healthcare? I kind of like systems like uk or Norway where there is a free system providing the floor and a private system if you want better treatment. Both the Canadian and the U.S. system is a bit weird to me.
Canada has a family doctor crisis because they barely pay them, flat out. Often a pure family doctor doesn't even hit $200k, so any med student today is going to go some specialty route. It needs to equalize with walk-in clinic rates or it will continue to not have good supply.
It's a combination of:
- A government that is outright hostile to health care workers, including fighting a battle against their unions during covid to reduce pay. The health minister famously went to a doctor's home and berated him from the driveway for tweeting something negative about him. Again, during the pandemic.
- Some specific changes to the pay schedule for doctors that makes it very difficult for them to spend more than 15 minutes with any given patient without losing out on income.
- The introduction a teledoctor system that pays better but most of the people on the other side of it don't live or work in the province.
And that's ignoring other kinds of medical workers, where they've done various things to force specialists to take on fewer patients, cut nursing headcounts to the bone, etc.
Every medical professional I've interacted with for the last few years (even before the pandemic) has seemed exhausted and on the verge of packing up and leaving.
Another special thing about the UK although is the amount of schooling needed to become one and consummate expense and risk seems significantly less. You can enter doctor school after high school and be in school for a significantly less amount of time. If you don't get in, you can move on with your life and go do something else with nothing really spent time wise or financially.
In the US/Canada, you need to get at least %75 of an undergrad, hope you get accepted into a graduate doctor school, which is extremely competitive, and then work you ass off in a very high workload situation, and then you need to do residency where your paid below minimum wage if you do an hours worked calculation, in a system designed by a doctor with a literal cocaine habit before cocaine was made illegal. Your in your 30s when you can start making proper money.
Public Healthcare absorves the heaviest blows: expensive surgeries, cancer treatment etc are mostly or only done by the single payer public system, while private Healthcare enjoys mostly low severity cases.
If there was no private system, the public system would pay for all of that. What you’ve described actually seems like it goes easier on the public system by allowing it to specialize on certain kinds of issues
The basics are actually the thing it does best; covid vaccination for example went well once the political stuff was handled.
It seems like the ceiling here is the amount of investment it would put in to manage 100% of the health needs —- I don’t see how the parallel existence of a private system causes the public system to be larger than it would be if there were no private system